The MTA’s city transit committee voted today to create a special team of investigators to keep tabs on chronic subway perverts and thieves to help bar them from the system.
The team would identify the worst repeat offenders and then let the city’s district attorney’s offices and the NYPD know so that prosecutors would be able to work to keep them out of the system at sentencing, and the cops could then arrest them as soon as they see the recidivists underground again.
“There is a responsibility on the part of the prosecutors to come to resolutions so that these people are not doing these things over and over again and the public and MTA employees are safe,” said board member Allen Cappelli, who proposed the move. “We are now going to keep track of these people.”
The panel unanimously voted to create the team after NYPD Transit Bureau Chief Joseph Fox presented them with felony crime statistics for the subways in January.
Fox said the number of incidents shot up 36 percent, from 151 to 206, last month compared to the same period last year.
Members of the board have been talking for years about finding ways to keep repeat offenders out of the system, but Monday’s vote is the first concrete step the board took toward keeping them out.
Cappelli said he thinks there will be about three people on the newly created team, and he hopes to have it up and running by June.